Sebastian Burger at GRAND TOUR Studio

Artist: Sebastian Burger

Exhibition title: A song from under the floorboards

Curated by: Domenico de Chirico

Venue: GRAND TOUR Studio, Milan, Italy

Date: November 14 – December 5, 2017

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig

Sebastian Burger’s point-of-view is metaphorically constituted by the frame, understood as a closed system which includes everything present in images and their signs, in the postures and gestures – visible and invisible – which are at the same time formed and unformed according to geometric schemas, relationships of light and shadow, chromatic variations and sharp outlines, ‘deframing’ and archetypes of a certain kind of cinema derived from the painterly.

In this regard, much like in Robert Wiene’s 1920 film Das Cabinet des Dr.Caligari, the representational effect of the scenographic, plastic and stylistic solutions adopted, instead of being absorbed and hidden – as is usually the case in photographic realism – is revealed and emphasized, overcharging the single frame with expressive graphic and linear elements. Wiene’s film in fact represents perhaps the high point of film’s subordination to the painterly, in so much as in the film painting appears almost in a pure form, in a kind of Utopian attempt to treat the screen like a canvas or – better yet – to transport to the screen the expressivity of painting.

According to this interrelation, the works of Sebastian Burger may be considered – through their empirical and aesthetic investigations–‘pictorialist’ films which reveal ability and technique, bookended by ironic pauses, and offer, much in the same way as the work of Jean-Luc Godard, the possibility of a comparison between time in painting and time in cinema.

-Domenico de Chirico
Grand Tour Studio is a Milan-based creative design studio and art event space founded by Simona Citarella in 2012.

A SONG FROM UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS ©Sebastian Burger, 2017

Supported by Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig, Germany

http://grandtourstudio.com/
http://tobiasnaehring.de/
http://sebastianburger.de/

The exhibition comprises ten paintings and a catalogue in collaboration with Rawraw Edizioni.
http://rawraw.it/